The plaintiffs include two public school districts and two Republican state legislators, as well as several parents and students.
A group of Pennsylvania plaintiffs, including Republican State Representatives Barbara Gleim and Aaron Bernstine, have filed a lawsuit to eliminate Commonwealth regulations that apply anti-discrimination protections to gender identity.
The lawsuit, filed in statewide Commonwealth Court on last Thursday, challenges the authority of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) to enforce regulations that conflict with the Pennsylvania Constitution. The filing argues the PHRC has illegally enforced anti-discrimination regulations for categories such as “core identity” and “gender identity” that are not recognized by the state constitution.
The plaintiffs note that the case is particularly relevant in the current political moment, as President Trump’s recent executive orders federally defining sex as male and female and banning trans-identifying males from girls’ sports have thrown PHRC regulations into question.
“The importance of overturning the PHRC regulations cannot be overstated,” writes Beth Ann Rosica, a parent named in the lawsuit, for Philadelphia outlet Broad + Liberty. “School districts are caught in the middle of an untenable situation where they must choose to follow the executive orders or state law and subsequently risk losing federal funding.”
Rosica adds that the PHRC’s oversight of public schools forces districts to permit trans-identifying students to use the bathroom of their choice, and that districts such as Springfield Township are using the regulations to ignore federal requirements protecting girls’ sports.
According to the attorneys behind the filing, the regulations in question “literally redefine the word sex to include an awful lot of categories that differ from male and female, and in many respects they depend upon how people think or how people feel.”
“It has little to nothing to do with their biological indicators of whether they’re male or female,” attorney Tom King told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. King added that the lawsuit is, “trying to strike down the regulations that the Human Relations Commission set forth on the basis that only the legislature could make these kinds of decisions. The Human Relations Commission wasn’t elected by anybody and nor were they ever authorized by the legislature to do so.”
Pennsylvania LGBTQ activist groups have criticized the lawsuit, with the Pennsylvania Youth Congress calling the filing “cruel” and a “continued assault on the progress and civil rights of vulnerable LGBTQ Pennsylvanians.”
In recent weeks, however, school districts and student-centered organizations have widely embraced the Trump administration’s executive orders freeing states from adhering to gender ideology. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA), for example, recently updated its policies to align the new federal requirements, ensuring separate competitions for male and female athletes.
“The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) took an important step in restoring safety, fairness, and opportunity in girls’ sports by aligning its policy with the recent executive order from President Trump,” observed Independence Law Center in a press release supporting the PIAA’s decision. “Words matter, and by replacing ‘gender’ with ‘sex,’ this update clarifies that girls will not have to compete against biological males in their own sports.”
